Dreaming of an Indebted Christmas?

For many Americans, the 2016 holiday is STILL an indebted Christmas!

The credit card companies may be wishing for an indebted Christmas season, but it will be bad news for the rest of us. Ultimately, it will be bad for the credit card companies too as their drive to hook more customers runs into the customers’ eventual inability to pay them back. Retailers love the ability to get more money from their customers than they have in available cash. But what happens when those same customers must stop making purchases because they have to pay back debts?

As the holiday season approaches, the pressure to spend spikes. This year, gift-buying Americans plan to spend $660 on average.

That’s according to new data from NerdWallet’s 2017 Consumer Holiday Shopping Report, which analyzed spending and behavior trends of more than 2,000 Americans aged 18 and over.

And holiday-induced debt is a growing problem. Although survey respondents say they plan to spend roughly the same amount as they spent last year, 24 percent of shoppers say they overspent in 2016, while 27 percent admit to not making a budget at all.

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What’s alarming about this pattern is that many Americans are still carrying last year’s debt as they head into yet another holiday season.

Millennials are the worst culprits here: 24 percent still haven’t paid off credit card debt incurred during the 2016 shopping season, while 16 percent of Gen-Xers haven’t and only 8 percent of boomers haven’t.

About the author

Joe Scudder

Joe Scudder is the "nom de plume" (or "nom de guerre") of a fifty-ish-year-old writer and stroke survivor. He lives in St Louis with his wife and still-at-home children. He has been a freelance writer and occasional political activist since the early nineties. He describes his politics as Tolkienesque.

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